Friday, January 27, 2017

HOT, HOT, HOT!

Having such a huge older house has presented some interesting challenges. One of those is how inefficient it is. The house has a hard time staying warm in the cold winter weather and instead of buying new heaters we decided to try converting a fireplace into a wood burning furnace fireplace. We really had wanted to turn the fireplaces into gas fireplaces, but the cost of that ended up not being as reasonable. The wood burning insert will get nice and hot and can potentially heat a space up to 2500 sq. ft. That saves us using our electric heaters as much giving us some good energy savings.

The fireplace people came and installed the unit, but had a hard time getting the fire going in it (to demonstrated it for us). They decided our large oak tree needed to be trimmed off of the chimney to stop the air drafting down it. It was frustrating to get this beautiful fireplace and yet not be getting it to work properly.

That night we went to work cutting off some of the branches that were causing the problems. We worked as well as we could with the tools we had. We determined we needed to bring in some smaller help. Grant and Talmage climbed up the tree to get the last branches out. Grant was nervous, but he hung in there and got the limbs cut!